Weather information (including wind, temperature, and turbulence) is one of the key factors of advanced air traffic management (ATM) concepts. Typically, weather information is not uniformly applied to aircraft in flight. In many cases, no weather information is available, or the weather information that is available is too old to be relevant or is not in the granularity needed to allow the flight management system (FMS) to provide accurate predictions to its flight models. Typically, wind information in the vertical plane is not used in calculations. Additionally, weather data (also referred to interchangeably as environmental data throughout this disclosure) that is provided to aircraft may not pertain to route changes that aircraft experience during routine flights. Further, more beneficial trajectories (i.e. optimum trajectories) are often not calculated and offered as alternatives based on specific local time-based weather interpolations.
Weather services such as the Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) provide weather data, but this only serves as a potential source of raw data, not corrected or projected. Another system that does a projection of weather over a trajectory (NOAA's Aviation Digital Data Service application) does not perform any time projections of the flight, nor does it perform weighted interpolation, nor suggest alternate paths, nor function outside of the United States.
Current solutions for weather generally use weather from sources that apply to a large region and are updated at relatively long intervals. The weather for one segment of the flight might not be applicable to other segments. Some attempts have been made at higher-resolution, and quicker updates of weather, but those are generally only applicable to a very small area, and extrapolating to other areas may introduce inaccuracies.
Data fusion may also be currently performed, but not in a user-preferred manner that allows different smoothing and filtering techniques to be applied, nor that takes a normalized timeline into account. Moreover, the weather within the most applicable volume around the trajectory is often not analyzed in the applicable time, which may lead to inaccurate results.
Existing generic weather data solutions may not allow for one or more of the following: for users to fuse data according to preferred time intervals and preferred criteria; for time-based trajectory predictions based on specific points and for the correlation of positions/times with relevant time-based weather data; for users to apply custom filtering mechanisms and to include weighting factors to enhance predictions; for optimal trajectory recalculations based on preferred characteristics and user-defined areas on a user-configurable flight segment perspective; for the consideration of vertical wind components; and for the consideration of each of wind in four dimensions, temperature, humidity, turbulence, barometric and altitude pressure, GPS altitude, and aircraft performance characteristics.
A need exists for weather data to be one or more of the following: made relevant, at the most micro-level possible, to a specific flight's trajectory; analyzed at frequent intervals or on demand upon receipt of an external trigger for potential impacts on a specific flight's trajectory; filtered, extrapolated, and fused between minimum resolutions and across different sources; weighted according to a volume of applicability based on user-selected parameters and weighted environmental data criteria; normalized across different time segments; used to suggest more efficient trajectories; modified and made available to specific aircraft, tailored to the aircraft's trajectory; and provided in a format that gives the largest potential impact information in priority order.